Automated emails are ideal for:
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Onboarding emails (eg. an email flow that sends after 7, 14 and 30 days)
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Reactivation emails (eg. an email to users that haven’t been active for more than 30 days)
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Promoting certain actions (eg. an email to new users that haven’t joined a group yet)
Publishing an automated campaign means that the email will be sent to a user once they match the criteria for this campaign after publishing. We will check the filters every hour. Users will only receive the automated email once during the lifetime of an automated campaign (so not every time they match the criteria).
Note that automated campaigns automatically complete after 365 days, which means that they will no longer send out automated emails. 30 days before the campaigns complete, we’ll show you a notification on the Email Campaigns overview when they will complete. Follow the steps at the bottom of this article on how to reactivate completed or expiring automated campaigns.
Creating an automated email
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Select the Email Type
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Select Automated as the email type
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Create the email itself
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Create a subject for the email (max. 256 characters)
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Create the body of the email
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Select recipients
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You can apply one or a combination of the following filters:
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Primary role
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Custom role
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Last activity
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Registration date
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You need to apply at least one filter before you can publish the automated campaign
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Note: We automatically exclude all users that unsubscribed from email campaigns and that have non-existing email addresses.
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Note: You’ll notice that you currently cannot select a Segment for automated campaigns. Since this is more complex (eg. what should happen if you update the segment for a live campaign), we’ve planned to add this in the near future.
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Examples
Onboarding email
Onboarding emails are emails that are typically sent out at various stages of your user’s lifecycle, all of which are meant to demonstrate value and drive engagement.
To make sure that an email goes out to new users 7 days after they registered, you need to:
- Create an automated email campaign.
- Create an email message that, for example, highlights next steps on the community, areas to engage with or a piece of content that’s proven to resonate well with new users.
- Select the Registration date filter and set it to More than 7 days ago (in plain human: send out this email once they pass this threshold)
Reactivation email
Reactivation emails are typically sent out after a specific period of inactivity. This period can of course differ per community, but the goal is to remind them of the value your community adds while you’re still on their retina. That’s why you could consider starting with a reactivation email after 30 days, and increase or decrease that duration as you learn more about your audience.
To make sure that an email goes out once a user hasn’t been active for more than 30 days, here’s how to set that up:
- Create an automated email campaign.
- Create an email message that, for example, reiterates the value of your community and has a clear and appropriate call-to-action (eg. asking a question in a specific category, viewing recent product updates, checking out new events, etc.)
- Select the Last activity filter and set it to More than 30 days ago
Completing an automated email
In order to stop an automated email from sending, you can click the Archive button. This will complete the campaign and archive it. Note that completed campaigns cannot be resumed.
Extending an completed/expiring automated email
Automated campaigns complete after 365 days, after which you will need to:
- Archive the completed/expiring campaign
- Duplicate the completed/expiring campaign
- Make necessary changes to the email content and triggers (optional)
- Publish the duplicated campaign
Editing an automated email
If you want to make changes to an active automated email, you will need to complete the current campaign, duplicate it and make your changes there. This will allow you to better compare and contrast the effectiveness of the changes in terms of success metrics.
